When the College Board canceled SAT testing in 2020, hundreds of colleges adopted test-optional admissions policies for that fall. The Urban Institute reported that the number of four-year colleges and universities going test-optional nearly doubled in one year, from 713 to 1,350.

Test-optional admissions had been spreading before the COVID pandemic, on the theory that standardized tests were inherently biased and discriminatory. The pandemic gave progressive college admissions offices an excuse to jettison an old tradition many blamed for campus and societal disparities.

By the fall of 2023, more than 80 percent of American bachelor-granting institutions had eliminated admission test requirements, according to FairTest, which advocates for such policies.

Eliminating the exams was intended to help disadvantaged students by replacing a vestige of systemic inequality with more accurate — more subjective — measures of students’ academic preparedness. The results were predictable.

A 2023 study by Harvard University economist Raj Chetty and his team demonstrated that the use of subjective criteria for assessing student applications benefits students from higher-income families and disadvantages academically promising students from lower-income families.

“Critics correctly note that standardized tests are not an unbiased measure of students’ qualifications, as students from higher-income families often have greater access to test prep and other resources,” Chetty told The Harvard Gazette. “But the data reveal that other measures — recommendation letters, extracurriculars, essays — are even more prone to such biases. Considering standardized test scores is likely to make the admissions process at Harvard more meritocratic while increasing socioeconomic diversity.”

Citing Chetty’s research, Harvard reinstated standardized testing for admissions in 2024.

Confirming Chetty’s conclusions, Dartmouth College researchers this spring showed that “test-optional policies reduce the probability of admission for high-achieving, disadvantaged students.”

Disadvantaged students with an SAT score above 1,400 “were more than three times as likely to receive an admissions offer if they submitted their score than if they did not.”

The case against standardized testing is that it merely reinforces structural inequalities inherent in U.S. education. Studies show instead that testing is a valuable predictor of future academic success and an effective accountability tool.

Testing provides educators, students, parents and policymakers with vital information about student performance and school effectiveness. Rigorous, high-quality testing has been shown not only to measure but also to improve student performance, even among the lowest-performing students.

Danish public schools are required to test third-grade students in math and report the results to parents. A 2020 study of this system found that “relatively negative feedback in third-grade math generates statistically significant increases in math achievement in subsequent years” and that “even students who fell below the lowest threshold (i.e., performed ‘considerably below average’) benefit from the test information. This indicates that providing standardized test information, even to the weakest students, does benefit achievement.”

A 2024 study of Missouri students found that “students with high scores on reading, math and science tests in eighth-grade are dramatically more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree within five years of finishing high school.”

These Missouri researchers found that “the strongest readers in eighth grade are about 62 times more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than the students with the lowest reading scores.”

Obviously, the response to such results is not to eliminate testing so that low-performing students’ unpreparedness can be hidden. It’s to use testing to identify and address academic weaknesses.

The predictive ability of middle school testing underscores the value of standardized tests. Identifying students who are academically behind in the early grades enables schools to support their catch-up. Schools regularly use testing to identify and replace weak curricula, improving student outcomes in future years.

Testing can also bust education myths. Researchers at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab have paired state standardized test results with local K-12 spending data to show that higher levels of K-12 spending, by itself, do not produce better academic outcomes.

Much of the opposition to standardized tests stems not from the idea that they don’t work but from the realization that they do. Quality accountability measures always generate resistance, whether from those to whom they apply or from ideologues who imagine that systemic oppression lurks behind all traditions and scientific standards.

Standardized testing is fun for no one. It can be misused and improperly implemented. It’s been shown to measure, predict and improve academic outcomes accurately. Eliminating it would harm the students whom such ill-conceived moves are allegedly designed to help.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Andrew Cline is president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, New Hampshire’s free-market think tank, and chairman of the New Hampshire Board of Education. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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